(General Feedback)

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Cloud computing might be tempting when you are just starting a company because you don't need to worry about having your own infrastructure. But as you host more and more storage and demand more and more bandwidth, the current cost per GB models become pricey.

There is a now-popular analogy between cars and the cloud. The current cloud offering is advantageous when you rent a car from city A to city B, but if you are traveling too often, you better buy your own.

All the hype around cloud computing set aside, if the cloud is aiming at the next big thing for businesses, it better be cheaper!! Cheaper for especially large companies.

When is Windows Azure going to cost less? At least, Amazon has a better-looking model in which they reduce per GB costs when the consumption rate is over a specific number. MS should provide a better solution to all-MS .NET developers.

Cloud computing might be tempting when you are just starting a company because you don't need to worry about having your own infrastructure. But as you host more and more storage and demand more and more bandwidth, the current cost per GB models become pricey.

There is a now-popular analogy between cars and the cloud. The current cloud offering is advantageous when you rent a car from city A to city B, but if you are traveling too often, you better buy your own.

All the hype around cloud computing set aside, if the cloud is aiming at the next…

It currently is almost completely non-functional. To see what one should look like go look at the Amazon Web Services pricing calculator

a) the slide bars without text input are horrific. I challenge you to try and figure out what a 3GB SQL server instance will cost you. Measure how many tries on the slider it takes to get it to be 3Gb

b) you have a weird mix of services, features and details:
--Web Sites are instances of a Web Worker
-- Cloud Services mixes Web and Worker role instances and the SQL DB on one page (but no Storage services ???!!??)
-- Data Services includes Azure Site Recovery ???!!??
-- Mobile Services include SQL server but not Storage Services (which you would use for stored files to be presented to the mobile device)
-- the "Full Calculator" leaves even an expert in your offering, rather confused

c) make better use of screen real-estate. I don't need the tab/icons to take up 1/8 of my screen at 1280x1024

Basically Its almost impossible to figure out what services you need until your developers implement the solution. This is catastrophic for anyone trying to pitch the use of Azure to their management.

e) Let me use my "current configuration" as an input to the calculator. My Azure Web Portal should be able to feed into the pricing calculator so that I can run What If scenarios

Folks this isn't rocket science. AWS has been doing this FOR TWO YEARS....

One last thing. LET ME decide what zone I am purchasing from. I currently am on the road to my nearshoring team in Latvia. So when my CEO back in Washington DC asks me what our configuration is going to cost.... I have to answer:

I don't know exactly since I'm getting European Pricing. This is silly

Fix your Cloud Pricing Calculator.

It currently is almost completely non-functional. To see what one should look like go look at the Amazon Web Services pricing calculator

a) the slide bars without text input are horrific. I challenge you to try and figure out what a 3GB SQL server instance will cost you. Measure how many tries on the slider it takes to get it to be 3Gb

b) you have a weird mix of services, features and details:
--Web Sites are instances of a Web Worker
-- Cloud Services mixes Web and Worker role instances and the SQL DB…

Build an API that exposes the data that is used by the Service Availability dashboard, so that we can build monitoring applications (e.g. WinPhone7) to keep an eye on things. I know about the RSS feed for the services, but it's largely ad-hoc, and pretty unparseable programmatically. Ideally, this is something that just returns Red/Yellow/Green for a DC+Service combination, and a comment if it's not all Green. Clearly, if everything is going well, it's heavily cacheable, and only when it's changed would you need to break that cache.

There was a question about this but it was closed several days ago. I know there is windowsazure pass but that is only for educators. It would be awesome if you can just verify your student identity (Like in Dreamspark) and then get serveral websites for free.

I have received three e-mails in one day from azure. One about downtime (I have no services right now), and two advertising features. None of these e-mails have unsubscribe buttons, and I cannot find a way to suppress them in the account page. All contact checkboxes are un-checked.

Microsoft really needs help in designing billing systems. I am sympathetic as in their entire history they never had a reason to bill retail customers. Invvoices generated through an ERP system are not the same thing as service bills tied to usage. Office 365 is terrible, but at least has a way of setting up a billing administrator that can view and download bills. Azure seems to have no parallel. I can't assign rights to just download and view bills to someone in accounting without giving them the ability to modify services. Plus the bills are hard to understand. sometimes hours of usage listed for a single server are physically impossible (more hours than are in a month…) etc.

Microsoft really needs help in designing billing systems. I am sympathetic as in their entire history they never had a reason to bill retail customers. Invvoices generated through an ERP system are not the same thing as service bills tied to usage. Office 365 is terrible, but at least has a way of setting up a billing administrator that can view and download bills. Azure seems to have no parallel. I can't assign rights to just download and view bills to someone in accounting without giving them the ability to modify services. Plus the bills are hard to understand. sometimes…

In the last 3 months Azure had rebooted VMs almost in 15 instances, and most of them are because of a bug, for a cloud concentric company this is unacceptable-- why is it not possible to fix the bug without rebooting VMs? Moving to cloud from on-premise was supposed to reduce hands on involvement and reduce costs-- neither of which are happening here. Can you please provide an answer as to when we can expect a solution where your customers VMs dont get rebooted randomly?

I have a cloud service, and I only need it to run for a few hours a day for some clients, while others I need it to run 24 hours a day, but from what Azure Support told me I am billed the same even if I stop the service.

For a large company the expense is marginal but for a small company the difference between 1 hour of billing per day times and 24 billed hours per day is 24 times the price.

Hi Microsoft,
I can’t help thinking that Microsoft is pursuing some sort of imperialist western agenda with the deployment of its worldwide Azure Datacenters! As an independent software developer based here in Dubai with clients right across Africa, The Middle East and the Sub-continent we currently have the choice of hosting in Western Europe (Amsterdam) which is between 6500km and 8000km away from our clients, or South East Asia (Singapore) 5000 to 11000kms away.
Guys it is time to realize that there is 2/5's of the world’s population nearby - let’s see something proactive in terms of datacenter deployment, and get the priorities right instead of deploying two new datacenters in Australia to service only 20mill people.
Get with it fellows!

Hi Microsoft,
I can’t help thinking that Microsoft is pursuing some sort of imperialist western agenda with the deployment of its worldwide Azure Datacenters! As an independent software developer based here in Dubai with clients right across Africa, The Middle East and the Sub-continent we currently have the choice of hosting in Western Europe (Amsterdam) which is between 6500km and 8000km away from our clients, or South East Asia (Singapore) 5000 to 11000kms away.
Guys it is time to realize that there is 2/5's of the world’s population nearby - let’s see something proactive in terms of datacenter deployment, and…